K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Two task organizers

I came across two organizers of sorts the other day, one for the console and one for the QT toolkit. One is rather impressive, while the other has the potential.

beeswax, as I understand it, is intended to follow the style of Lotus Agenda, which I must admit I hadn’t heard of. beeswax itself has a rather conventional look about it.

But it might just look conventional because it’s patterned after an application that had its last stable release in 1992. Anything established that far back is probably the standard for everything since.

I like the idea though. Rather than confining yourself to particular types of information, you have a blank slate in the way you organize and categories your tasks or tables. It appears very flexible, the structure is easy to pick up and learn, and for what I have seen it’s quick and speedy, like a console application should be.

I made a lot of qualifications in that last paragraph though, because it’s likewise obvious that beeswax is a work in progress. A lot of the core functions, like categorizing and demoting and promoting items, didn’t work for me. Even the “q” key, which is supposed to quit the program, didn’t work.

I tried it in both Arch and Crux, and had the same halfway-functional results. I could add and edit items and arrange them vertically, but beyond that, beeswax didn’t really seem ready for prime-time.

It has the potential though. The last update to the home page was around a year ago, so perhaps that potential has already fizzled. And coupled with the fact that the last version of the original Lotus Agenda is available for free, it might be that waiting for beeswax to mature is an unattractive option, compared to perhaps running the original thing in an emulator.

After looking at beeswax though, I found a link for TreeLine, which is much the opposite of beeswax, though no less interesting.

TreeLine has a very polished and complete look about it, with lots of cute buttons and smiley faces in the right places. I’ll admit I don’t cross paths with QT applications very often — not by choice but by circumstance really. So this was rather fun to try.

Where beeswax (and Agenda) espouse a free-form approach, TreeLine requires you to pick a style at the outset. Your list and the items on it are labeled, structured and displayed according to that style. That might sound confining, but there are plenty of templates to pick from, and they are all something you are probably aiming at anyway (like a to-do list, or a contact list).

After that, it becomes a simple matter to start entering information into the tree, arranging it however is appropriate. Right-click for full action menus, or use keystrokes to speed things up. To-do lists or checklists have special options in the information panels, which allow you to tick off or prioritize, depending.

I like TreeLine for having a polished interface and a structured feel to it, but neither it nor beeswax (or Agenda, to be honest) is likely to dethrone hnb for me any time soon. TreeLine is clever and attractive, but seems unnecessarily mouse-driven, or overcomplicated for things like checklists. And like I said, beeswax doesn’t really feel like it’s finished.

So hnb by comparison is just too fast and easy. Right arrow makes a new branch. Start typing and a new item is added. You can embed checklists in standard hierarchies. Copy and paste throughout the tree. Export into several different formats, including HTML.

Maybe I’m biased, but hnb is still the champ for me. Try all three though, and take your pick. This is all about choice. ;)